At Google, whether you're in engineering, product marketing, accounting or public policy, we all try to be as innovative as possible in our work. So it was a real pleasure for us last week to work together with the University of Glasgow and co-host a meeting that took a new and innovative approach to debating and mapping "the impact of online information in the political, economic and social sphere". Too often, public policy is made on the back of politics rather than deep research and evidence - and we're keen to help reduce the gap between policy and research by bringing together some of the people in the UK for whom robust evidence is a way of life.
Other big questions tackled included what values people attach to their personal data, the right level of Government intervention in improving digital inclusion and whether online campaigning is doing anything to change the nature of politics. We also uncovered a great deal of common ground between the academics and the Googlers about how we do our jobs. At Google we analyse data patterns to understand how to improve our search algorithims: at universities, data crunching is also at the heart of good research. We discovered we had more in common than we at first realised. Professor Sarah Oates from the Politics Department at the University of Glasgow curated the programme and invited the participants. Professor Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester) spoke about the Online Electorate and Web 2.0, Ashley Lloyd (Edinburgh Business School) presented on Bridging Technological Gaps and Professor Angus Laing (Loughborough) and Dr Debbie Keeling (Manchester) on how patients seek health information online.
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